Meet Ann

Nice to meet you! My name’s plain & simple Ann, without even the fanciful 'e.' Glad you found your way here into some quiet. I know — it can get a bit loud out there. Maybe you’d like to wander a bit in the quiet — — Let's connect...
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“This is about risking and reaching out first to the other — the Other across the chasm that is your table, the Other that is your disagreement, that is your soapbox, that is the debate of the hour, reaching out to the other across party lines and lines drawn in the sand and across the aisle — and serving the Other.”

It’s the journey to “the Other,” to the outsider, to the outlier — that always leads you higher up and deeper in.

I’m doing this because I really believe: In the heat of culture wars, we need to be deployed on Listening Tours armed with Preemptive Love.

Before I’d flown out, I’d stood there at the back door, kids clinging to me, their tears streaming loud and a little bit wild. Shalom had whispered it into my ear, her fear wet cheek pressed against mine: “Please don’t go, please — I don’t want you to die.”

Oh Child. There are a thousand ways to die — and to never have really lived. And there is a way to pick up your cross and die so that you get to really live.

Die to your rights, die to your reputation, die to your convenience, die to your comfort, so you get to literally live love. So you literally become Cross-shaped love.

We’re not playing here.

We can talk of love all we want when we’re living in our own ghettos of like-mindedness. But we only get to live love when we actually go walk to The Other, where folks think and live something other than we do. We only get to stop talking about love and actually live it when we stop waiting for someone else to do it and reach our own hand out.

When I had sat in Israel at a Friday evening Shabbat dinner in the home of a rabbi, he had stood up at the end of the table and said something utterly unforgettable, that I had scratched down on the napkin:

Love one another means — Love the Other.

I’d sat there staring at that: Love one another doesn’t just mean loving the people who are like you — it means who are you loving who is opposite of you?

Love, sacrifice, suffer for the Other — the Other who thinks something other than you do, the Other who believes something other than you do, the Other who lives something other than you do.

And it’s been pounding in me like a drum, like a marching beat, like a war cry in the middle of a thousand culture wars:

Love doesn’t necessarily mean bless or agree with — it means sacrifice for and suffer with.

Only when you have some skin in the game, can you say that Christ is in you.

And that’s why I get on the plane and fly to Iraq. Talk’s cheap. Sacrifice is expensive and it’s exactly what you do when you’ve bought and paid for with a price.

So I’d stood there at the back door before I left, scooped Shalom up close, buried my face in her: “You know I’d never, ever go, if you didn’t have the very best daddy in the world…. “ She’d smiled through tears and nodded brave.

When a Father’s love is your atmosphere, you’re willing to risk anything to love the world.

One of our boys hugged me goodbye. Slapped my back just a bit too hard and grinned: “Love you, Mom. Keep your head on your shoulders!”

When Lynne and I land in Iraq, we come in on a plane of nearly all men, land at almost 4’ O very dark in the morning.

I keep telling my stomach to unknot. Keep telling Dad to hush up there in my head as we stop at checkpoints, soldiers and their machine guns peering in our open windows, checking out our nodding smiles.

When we are standing there in a refugee camp, with all these beautiful people, these families fleeing ISIS, Dad’s voice has grown real quiet. All I can hear is my heart pounding loud and right.

When we meet Hanen, she tells us that she’s buried 3 children already. Left their graves back in Fallujah, when she and her remaining two children fled ISIS. Her hair falls long down her back, the weight of glory of these women cascading.

They’re living here in what is an abandoned “collective” — a collective of cement block cubicles that Saddam Hussein had built for women in this area after Hussein had their husbands and sons lined up and killed.

Hanen is shaking her head, violently shaking her head —- “No. No, we cannot go. They are Shia in Nassiriya. The Shia will kill us in Nassiriya.” She’s wide-eyed, terrified. I can’t take my eyes off her face. Sometimes the only way for our hearts can heal — is to risk them to our enemy.

On our way out, we step over the forgotten and wide-eyed doll, waiting for someone to pick it up.

A few crumbling blocks down is a family that ran from ISIS less than two weeks ago.

“We were in front of our house, cooking — and a rocket from Daesh exploded right beside our house,” Ahmed tells this to me as we stand outside under this tree erupting into a blossom of spring.

I look down into the faces of their two little boys. They call ISIS something different here— they call ISIS Daesh. Because it sounds similar to the Arabic words daes — which means someone who crushes something underfoot.

Who crushes boys like this underfoot? Who cuts throats of babies and rapes 9 year old girls and sends mamas, who have buried 3 children, and on the brink of burying a fourth, fleeing in wide-eyed terror?

“We just grabbed each other — we have no time to grab anything else, we just have to grab and hold on to each other — and we run to the river, to cross at the bridge, but Daesh has blown up the bridge — crushed it.” The father, Ahmed, shows me with his hands…. his trembling hands.

“So then we have to run for our hours. For two long days, we keep walking and running, to find another way to get across the river, and we beg a man with a car to take us — take us far away from Daesh.”

I kneel down. To steady myself. To look into the little boys’ eyes.

“Your dreams and hopes?” I ask the mother.

The mother’s chin trembles — and Ahmed whispers their heartbeat: “We just want to go home.”

And some dam in him lets go, crushed — and the man openly weeps.

Weeps for hopes destroyed, home obliterated, life as he knew it, worked for it, sacrificed for it — completely crushed.

Bonhoeffer had said of the Church, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

Who is going to show up and bandage up the wounds of the victims being crushed beneath the wheels of injustice?Who’s going to step up, and lay a bit of their life down and drive a spoke into the wheel of ISIS, Daesh, the Crusher?

Absurd comes from that Latin word, ‘surdus,’ which means ‘deaf.’ The anger, the rhetoric, the noise under our own private roofs and out in our public forums has become so loud, we have fallen deaf — fallen deaf to God… fallen deaf and numb and dumb to the cries of each other.

Fallen deaf to the echo of God that beats in the heart of every God-made heart.

Whenever we deafen, demonize, and dehumanize anybody — we can legitimize anything.

A faithful life is The Listening Life — because it’s that Latin word which means “listening,” audire, that gives us the word “obedient.”

The only way to a sincerely God-obedient life — is to live a sincerely Listening Life.

Listen to the spouse who’s gutted and wounded you a bit, listen to kid who’s voice is making the hair on the back of your neck stand up just a bit these days, listen to that voice on the other end of the spectrum, listen to the Muslim, the Jew, the Christian who’s very different from you — really listen to broken hearts —- and be the one who reaches out.

“We are supporting and bringing food to families here in these camps,” Jeremy turns to me, “who have a cousin, a brother, an uncle who is serving with ISIS. There are relatives of ISIS here — and we are serving them too.” Jeremy waves his arm toward hundreds of crumbling block ‘houses’ and the huddling brave who are caught and lost.

Love doesn’t necessarily mean bless or agree with — it means sacrifice for and suffer with.

That’s been ringing me for weeks. And: If we all made it a practice to genuinely listen everyday to one person with whom we disagree, we’d get to genuinely practice our faith.

We’d get to practice resurrection.

This is unspeakably hard. This is unspeakably holy.

Jesus turned and listened to the woman bleeding… paused to hear the woman caught in adultery… sat and attended to the words of the Samaritan at the well — and He never stopped waiting and listening on His Father.

In the space between God and earth, Jesus became all ear.

The editorials scream and opinion pages blare and bloggers rage and all the pundits and talking heads just keep doing that: talking.The media screams because fear is what sells.

Join me in #365GIFT — and become a brokenhearted hallelujah, a GIFT to the world, every day for a year, living broken and given, one intentional act of brokenhearted compassion at a time. Subscribe to posts and let’s begin together.